F E AT U R E
TALKING TO JOE AS PRESENTER OF RTÉ RADIO’S LIVELINE, JOE DUFFY IS THE VOICE OF UNDERSTANDING AND EMPATHY. HIS OWN LIFE HAS ALSO BEEN TOUCHED BY TRAGEDY AND LOSS Joe Duffy
BY JOHN SCALLY
I
t’s been a tough year for Joe Duffy. In February he lost his beloved mother Mabel, aged 93. “She enjoyed great health, even when she warned off night-time intruders when a curtain rail while living alone a few years ago,” Joe tells me. “The Gardaí in Ballyfermot wanted her to go to hospital but when the paramedics arrived, they discovered she had a healthier blood pressure than the assembled younger uniformed men and women around her!” However, her vision began to fail dramatically. “Again, after going through a long regime of very painful eye injections, she refused any painkillers but gradually her health began to fail and she became frail, which she found hard to accept. “[When she was] almost clinically blind, I rang her favourite priest Fr Joe asking if he could give her Holy Communion in the body of the church as he did with others during Mass. The following Sunday he went down to where Mabel sat and offered her Communion; she refused it, denying she had an eyesight problem and she beat him back up to the altar!” Unfortunately, Mabel contracted COVID-19 before the vaccination rollout had begun. “Falls at home and a stroke brought the inevitable and in the middle of the Covid pandemic in 2020, when St James’s Hospital insisted she needed intensive 24-hour help,
she contracted Covid before vaccines arrived, and she reluctantly went into Kiltipper Woods Care Centre where she lived and was cared for brilliantly until her death,” says Joe. He recalls that Mabel was a hard worker all her life, despite having no education. “We have come a long way in her lifetime. On the day that Mabel was born, May 11, 1929, the new Dáil was debating the closure of workhouses, which had existed in Ireland
bought the house off the corporation with her own money, she carried the deeds around in her handbag. “I seldom saw my mother sitting down. It’s only after she got a part-time job as a cleaner in the toy factory. It was to be a six-month fundraising project to buy a twin-tub washing machine. It lasted for 20 years. She insisted on cutting her grass with a shears and a push lawn mower up to the time she was 90.” SOCIAL CONSCIENCE As a confessor to the nation on his Liveline programme, Joe has carved out a unique niche for himself on the broadcasting landscape. At times the programme requires a touch delicate enough to catch butterflies without damaging their wings. Other times, a more forceful approach is called for. The popular stereotype of RTÉ presenters is that they belong to the exclusive Dublin 4 set, but Joe Duffy is not of that ilk. “We were never well off,” he recalls. “My father wasn’t always working. He had to go to England to get work for four or five years. I remember going up every Saturday evening to a public phone in the local butcher’s shop to wait for the call from my father. “I was born in 1956. By the time my days at national school were coming to an end the big question was could I possibly even think of going to secondary school. The fees were £25 a year. That sounds like nothing today,
“How come I was the only one from Ballyfermot? The statistic which says it all is that if you are born in Mount Merrion you are 44 times more likely to get to Trinity than if you are from Ballyfermot. That inequality really hit me and motivated me to try and change things.”
18 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022
since before the famine, and it is fair to say that Mabel and her siblings did not have an easy life. “But the six girls were a strong and lively sisterhood, working together in the same factories from an early age. She was 24 when her first child James was born. She was living in Mountjoy Place, but things changed dramatically in 1958 when we were picked out of a lottery at City Hall and we got a house in Ballyfermot. She lived in Claddagh Green for over 60 years, refusing any other better housing offers and when she eventually
